When she costarred on "Homicide: Life on the Streets," she held her own with a crew of cops. On "Rescue Me," she was the gutsy paramour among a crew of macho firemen.

And in her current role on USA's "Necessary Roughness" — which returns with new episodes Wednesday — she plays the psychotherapist to a pro-football team who clearly calls the plays.

But Thorne admits it's all an act. "The reason I get so nervous for talk shows is because I get nervous being myself," she says.

"I worry that I'm not interesting enough or clever enough and that goes way back to when I was younger and I figured out pretty early in high school that to be able to be somebody else and to rely on someone else's lines and character's journey — then I got to be interesting and complex," she says.

In spite of her laudatory work, Thorne has been close to quitting acting twice — and each time Fate intervened in a mysterious way. "Those first years in New York, '91 through '93, were the hardest and loneliest and hungriest — I was so hungry all the time," she recalls.

Surviving on one meal a day of McDonald's and French fries, she remembers calling her mother, "a very gifted astrologer," and telling her she'd made a mistake and would return to Boston and go back to school and study psychology.

"My mother did my chart and she came back and said, 'As much as I want you to come home, if you can hold on until the end of '94, I see everything turning 180 (degrees).'"

In the span of one week, Thorne managed to capture the lead in an independent film, obtain an agent (who still represents her) and wangle roles in two plays. During four months, "I'd be shooting a movie during the day, hike it downtown to do the 8 o'clock (play), then jump in a cab to do the 10 o'clock. Even though I was so hungry and the skinniest I'd ever been — which was not attractive — those three things happened and did change the course of my life. My mother was right. I called her after each thing and she'd say, 'One more thing is coming.'"

Thorne claims she doesn't share the gift, though she admits she's intuitive and often perceptive. The other event that shook up her life was the death of her maternal grandfather, whom she affectionately calls Papi.

She was costarring in a play in La Jolla, Calif., when she got the news. She was told she had 24 hours to go back for the funeral because she had no understudy. But she was too upset to care.

"When I went home to the funeral, I was meditating a lot of the time," she says. "I was trying to calm myself down and figure out how I was going to live without Papi and I had a very intense vision of him telling me to basically pull my boot straps up and stop feeling sorry, that he was now my guardian angel and to get back on the plane. It was very specific.

"It was like he was speaking to me. It was just a lesson because it was about several things: Drop the pity party. It was to get back on the course of the thing that made me feel so 'Callie' and so good, and that life goes on and that he was going to be with me always. ... I stepped back into that theater and I felt like he was there holding my hand. And that is what I bounce to when I get really, really nervous, I bounce to my Papi and imagine him holding my hand in regards to acting and realizing that anything is possible."